[RE-wrenches] Enphase intermittent breaker trippjng

[Chad Waits]

Yeah. We've had them trip in the evening as well. Just never come back
online when the sun comes up. We've replaced breakers and meggered all
wires. The only solution we've found is isolating that one bad inverter and
replacing it.

really frustrating.

Chad Waits
President-Net Zero Solar
Cell: (520) 270-4873



On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 7:15 AM Jason Szumlanski <
jason at floridasolardesigngroup.com> wrote:

> I'm guessing I don't have a bad inverter problem since this is occurring
> on two different strings. But I guess I can't rule it out.
>
> I should also have mentioned that the breakers apparently trip in the
> middle of the night more often than not. I know that because the envoy goes
> offline. So this does not seem to be a power production issue. The
> inverters should be sleeping at the time that the breakers trip.
>
> I also ruled out rain. The first couple of times I suspected something got
> wet, but subsequent tripping occurred during dry spells.
>
> On Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:12 AM Chad Waits <chadwaits at netzerosolar.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Hey Jason,
>>
>> We have experienced this on multiple systems over the past 2 years. We
>> have one system where 1 inverter pops an entire sub offline that has 72
>> other inverters in it (screenshots attached). The only way we have been
>> able to isolate the problem inverter(s) is to start first with isolating
>> circuits, and then unplugging individual inverters until the culprit is
>> found. We've had multiple cases escalated to top engineers and we have yet
>> to get an explanation of what is going on. Obviously something in the bad
>> inverter(s) is creating a catastrophic short but what is causing that has
>> not been revealed to us.
>>
>> [image: Screen Shot 2020-05-21 at 7.10.24 AM.png]
>> [image: Screen Shot 2020-05-21 at 7.09.59 AM.png]
>>
>> I'd appreciate anything you may find out in your investigations.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Chad Waits
>> President-Net Zero Solar
>> Cell: (520) 270-4873
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 6:57 AM Jason Szumlanski <
>> jason at floridasolardesigngroup.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm trying to resolve an intermittent frustrating problem with and
>>> Enphase IQ system. There are three AC Branch circuits of 9 microinverters
>>> each coming into an Enphase AC combiner.
>>>
>>> What has been happening is one of the BR220 branch circuit breakers and
>>> the combine CH240 breaker in the main backfed load center have been
>>> tripping simultaneously. It has happened about four times in the last 6
>>> months. It was always the same branch circuit breaker, so we kept
>>> investigating that string, checking the junction box, trunk cable, and cap,
>>> etc. Finally we swapped out the BR220 breaker.
>>>
>>> Fast forward 4 weeks, and we got another call. This time a different
>>> branch circuit breaker and the main breaker tripped simultaneously. We
>>> checked that branch circuit and could not find any fault. It seems unlikely
>>> that two branch circuit breakers would be faulty, so we have now switched
>>> out the CH240 main breaker in hopes that it is the culprit.
>>>
>>> I'm not totally confident in this resolution and I have my fingers
>>> crossed. If that doesn't work, does anyone have any suggestions on another
>>> diagnostic step? These intermittent problems are a major hassle. One
>>> thought I had was to switch to a supply side interconnection with a fusible
>>> disconnect. Maybe the intermittent fault would blow one of the two line
>>> fuses so at least I could narrow it down to which line the fault is on if
>>> there is in fact a fault.
>>>
>>> I have experienced two other tripping breaker issues with Enphase
>>> systems in the past. Neither of them were systems I installed. One turned
>>> out to be branch circuits that were not properly paired up and landed on
>>> different breakers. Another time we had an inverter with an internal fault
>>> which eventually"blew up" with a loud popping noise and smoke billowing out
>>> of it. That happened after resetting a trip breaker multiple times. This
>>> case seems to be unrelated to those issues. I'm perplexed.
>>>
>>> Jason Szumlanski
>>> Florida Solar Design Group
>>>
>>>
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